Daniel Sprong's Long Journey Home

If you’ve seen him play even once, you know about Daniel Sprong’s shot. Robby Fabbri remembers it from when they played together at nine years old. Joe Veleno felt its bite long before he got to the NHL.

“I remember I was playing Peewee Bantam, and I was off for Christmas break,” Veleno recalls. “And my brother’s team, which Daniel was on, had their last practice, and it was just a five-on-five scrimmage. And I remember just being out there and getting a shot off the ankle, and it stung me pretty bad.”

David Perron—who played with him when he broke into the NHL with the Penguins and in a summer three-on-three league in Montreal last summer—can also attest to the brilliance of Sprong’s shot: “He can shoot from the corner, shoot from the blue line, shoot from the dots, shoot from wherever. He’s in range all the time to score. He’s got a really quick release, sneaky shot."

In fact, it was a shot so good that it moved a family from Amsterdam to Montreal when its author was just seven years old.

“Amsterdam is home,” Sprong tells The Hockey News. “It’s where I’m from, but my heart and my life is in Montreal. That’s where my best friends are, that’s where I grew up, that’s where I became a man you can say now. I’m 26, so I think I can’t say I’m a kid anymore.”

The Sprong family made the move because of what it might mean for young Daniel’s hockey career.

“It started off as a joke,” Sprong explains. “We were gonna try it for a year. We would join a hockey team and try it for a season. Fell in love with the winter, fell in love with Montreal. It’s a very European city.”

In soccer-mad Amsterdam, the opportunities for developing hockey players were limited. “We have one rink in the city that closed for two, three months in summertime, so you’d have to go skate out 45 minutes, an hour outside of the city,” Sprong says. “I just remember playing there for a bit and traveling to Finland for a couple tournaments or playing teams there with the Dutch team.”

He played soccer in the schoolyard, and he cheers for Ajax (Amsterdam’s proud representative in the Dutch Eredivisie). However, soccer never stuck: “If you ask the guys, my two-touch game ain’t European at all,” Sprong quips.

It was always going to be hockey. His father Hannie had grown up playing and became his first coach. Daniel's mother Sandra supported the mission, and his talent was so obvious, even at seven, that the family opted to make the trans-Atlantic leap.

When the Sprong family arrived in Montreal, they weren’t sure whether they’d stay more than a year, but la Métropole worked its charms.

“It’s a great city to live in,” he explains. “Hockey was going good, my parents were happy, everyone was happy living there, so I think one year after the other, we just continued staying, and next thing you know we’re still there.”

“I’m fortunate enough that my parents gave me that opportunity,” says Sprong, a simple statement, but a profound one. He made good on his parents’ investment and then some by becoming the third player ever born in the Netherlands to play in the NHL.

Today, when you watch him play, you could be forgiven for assuming Sprong was born with that shot. 

He skates around the rink at a crouch, peering over his shoulder through a purple-tinted visor in search of a little pocket of space, stick always on the ice ready when the next pass comes—a hunter awaiting his next opportunity to fire a lethal blast. When the puck comes off his stick, a harmless bid from the blue line or an off-balance, flat-footed look become Grade A chances. MoneyPuck estimates his shooting talent as 25.3% better than league average, as measured in the 2022-23 season.

However, despite how it might seem, that shot wasn’t God-given. “I put in the work for it,” Sprong says. “I don’t think that just comes naturally. I put in the hours, and I put in the time.”

Honing it was a simple process: “I’d go out in the summer time to a park where there’s a net, put the board down, and put some music on and shoot away, pick different corners.”

It’s how his shot became so potent by age seven, and it’s a ritual he returns to for more than just practice. “I do that two or three times a week because I guess for me, it’s more mental clarity or just to do my thing,” Sprong explains. “Usually now I go in the summer with two, three buddies, and we just shoot, and we talk and keep my rhythm and technique going. It’s something I’ve always done.”

“This summer, it was a bit of country, a bit of house, a bit of pop,” he says of the accompanying music, which is one part of the sessions that has evolved over the years. “I’m not a big hip-hop guy, but I went to a Drake concert this summer, so I kind of got into hip-hop now slowly. When I was younger, it was more rock and roll—Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bon Jovi, U2, Van Halen, those type of bands.”

Based on the work he’d put into it, Sprong believed in his shot from his boyhood days in Amsterdam, then Montreal, but external validation didn’t come until he turned pro. “Growing up I always knew I had [a great shot], but when I turned pro, that’s really when everyone started talking about it and made it my key weapon,” he says.

However, the transition from QMJHL’s Charlottetown Islanders to the NHL wasn’t quite as smooth as Sprong might have hoped. After putting up 39 goals and 49 assists in 68 games for Charlottetown in 2014-15, Sprong made the Pittsburgh Penguins out of training camp the following season.

At an individual level and as a team, Sprong and the Penguins didn’t get off to the start to the ‘15-16 season that they’d intended. In December, head coach Mike Johnston was fired and replaced by Mike Sullivan. Not long after, Sprong was returned to the Q. The experience opened his eyes to the reality of professional hockey as an occupation.

“In juniors, you get a small glimpse of it with the travel and things like that, but I would say in Pittsburgh when I was 18 when we weren’t winning games and the coach got fired, and [Mike] Sullivan got there, I saw the business side for the first time, and then I got sent back to juniors," he recalls. "That’s when I first realized that it is a business, and you just learn from that.”

Sprong was sent back to Charlottetown after 18 games with Pittsburgh, in which he’d scored two goals with no assists. It was “a bit frustrating,” he says of the experience. “You’re 18, you’re playing in the NHL, and you gotta go play juniors, it was a bit frustrating in the beginning. And at that point, you just gotta handle it.”

“I started off hot and kinda slowed down—I wouldn’t say slowed down because I still put up the numbers, but mentally it was getting frustrating,” Sprong says of his game upon returning. He finished the season with 16 goals and 30 assists in 33 games with the Islanders.

After the QMJHL season ended, he joined the Penguins as a black ace for the postseason but sustained a shoulder injury that required surgery and kept him out until January of the following year, derailing his hopes of nabbing an NHL roster spot at training camp.